Missing children

must be one of the worst nightmares for parents. I can't even begin to comprehend how bad it must be to have your child go missing, thought - or known - to be abducted by a stranger and almost certainly sexually abused and then murdered. If you don't know for certain then there must always be that tiny hope that, one day, there will be a knock at the door and your child will appear.
It must be bad enough when a child leaves home and you know they have gone but you know that they did so of their own volition.
I know someone whose child was murdered and another whose son committed suicide. They won't ever fully "get over" those events.  They have perhaps learned to live with them in their own way but their children and what happened to them are part of each day of their lives. 
     "Sometimes I just stop for no reason and say S.... and it hurts! What must it be like for them?" one of them told me in a quiet but anguished voice yesterday. We were both in the library and she had just heard that there was going to be a new search for the three Beaumont children, children who went missing fifty  years. Nobody knows - yet. How did someone manage to abduct three children from a trip to the beach without someone noticing something? How did someone manage to, presumably, murder three children and hide their bodies and not get caught? It seems incomprehensible.
Two more young girls went missing later and their whereabouts has not been discovered either. It doesn't make sense. The sister of one is still hoping to find out. No doubt other family members are too. Those involved in the searches will always wonder. Did I miss something? Could I have done this instead of that? Is there a question I should have asked of one of the people I interviewed? If...if...if...  It must go on forever.
I know other people whose children have simply disappeared from view. They know their children are alive but they have had no contact with them for years. One of them once told me, of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann,  "It doesn't feel like it but I suppose we're the lucky ones compared with the parents of children who disappear like that." 
The parents of the Beaumont children are frail and elderly now. They must know they won't see their children again, must hope that the new site being explored will reveal something - but, if it does, then a tiny little hope will also be extinguished forever.